Ask HN: When will Intel start selling chips that are not vulnerable to Meltdown | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When will Intel start selling chips that are not vulnerable to Meltdown

33 pointsphyller9 comments

They were informed on June 1, 2017, and appear to have been selling vulnerable chips since then. I have not seen anything indicating that the chips being produced today are not vulnerable. When is this going to end?

View on HN

And an interesting follow-on question would be: of the OS patches now being implemented which sometimes cause a performance hit, will that code later be able to detect when it's running on a "fixed" processor? So that it can turn off the unneeded extra protections when running on a newer chip?

Last I checked: the linux kernel initially had a comment saying something to the effect of "assume all x86 processors are vulnerable." Later, they added a check for amd, which they don't do mitigations on. It seems likely they'll add another check, when future processors come out. As for windows and macosx, it's up for speculation. No other OSes yet have mitigations in place.

Another interesting follow one (I think): if the OS patches cause the performance hit, would the hardware fix not cause the same (or similar) performance impact?

Good question, I did some Googling and couldn't find anything either.

Interestingly, not a single result is returned when searching "Meltdown" in Intel's website. Hopefully Intel will fill us in soon.

The more pertinent question is whether or not Intel (or AMD or ARM CPU makers) will release a new chip that is out of the box still vulnerable to meltdown or spectre when running unpatched OSes.

If the issue is completely fixed by the latest firmware update, they could be selling chips that are not vulnerable tomorrow.

The question is what's on that firmware update and does it fix the issue completely.

Last I checked, the kernel fixes only check if it's running on an Intel processor (and exclude AMD). They aren't checking if they are running on a certain revision of the chip. That could probably change very quickly if the firmware is indeed the full fix.

Otherwise expect new silicon to arrive in 6-18 months.

Perhaps they already have. Are there older chips that do not have the issue?

None in the x64 architecture. x86 chips before the Pentium Pro don't have it. Itanium apparently doesn't either.

Maybe the same time we see 10nm chips from Intel and Optane DIMMs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com